VIVID AUDIO KAYA S12

Back when Steve Urkel (in the sitcom Family Matters, portrayed by Jaleel White) was showing everybody the best way to dress (and do property damage), my friend Ken Kessler, the high-level audio scribe at Hi-Fi News & Record Review, explained to me the secret of how to write a proper audio review: “Herb, the secret of writing an effective review is not to lose the reader in the middle.” I took that to mean, put all the technological meat—and some tawdry stories—in the product description. Then sneak some spicy double entendre into the setup part.

Unfortunately, that strategy hasn’t worked for me.

What I try for now in my product descriptions is to give readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of my reviewing process, introducing them to the personalities of the people who create and support audiophile brands.

The reason I do this—aside from trying to keep the reader reading—is because it’s necessary. Today, the websites of most audio companies are long on fancy photos and hyperbolic sales pitches and short on facts, relevant specifications, reasonable viewpoints, and prices (the real spicy bits).

To collect necessary data for my heart-of-the-review descriptions, I resort to what my friends call “Herb questions” via email. Sometimes, as in this article, I show the exact questions and responses. For me, the most interesting part of audiophile audio is the people, the ones who make it and sell it and the ones who listen and wonder.

Some spicy bits

When I began this review of Vivid Audio’s new Kaya S12 stand-mount speaker ($6500/pair in standard finishes, stands $2000 extra), I knew very little about Vivid’s renowned chief engineer, Laurence Dickie, or his in 2010. In his subsequent Q&A with John Atkinson, Dickie said that the G1’s unusual shape started off as a form-follows-function extrapolation of the transmission-line loading of the G1, not just for the woofer but for all the drivers. Dickie calls his tapered transmission lines “exponential absorbers.”